The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 2 156 or faculty member. Further, the participants’ satisfaction with the support that they received, especially from their university, varied greatly. Although some participants felt validated, others felt unsupported. It remains to be seen how the response of the supervisors might inform participants’ actions in the future, although Cook et al. (2019) found that CITs who disclosed a salient concern to their supervisors and felt unsupported may be less willing or unwilling to bring up similar issues in the future with the same supervisor. The finding that CITs in this study were discussing the microaggressions with family and peers must be carefully considered, even though this finding is not entirely unexpected. Ladany et al. (1996) found that CITs commonly discussed issues withheld from their supervisors with peers and friends, although these people were most often also in the mental health field. Further, studies have found that counselors with marginalized identities value the support of others with shared identities (Branco & Bayne, 2020; Haskins et al., 2015). However, like other scholars (Ladany et al., 1996), we wonder how a CIT’s professional development or client’s care might be impacted by heeding the advice of or seeking support from someone who does not possess the necessary training or is bound to the same ethical and professional mandates as a clinical supervisor or infield peer. Limitations There are limitations to this study that are important to note. Although researchers recruited participants from CACREP-accredited programs from across the United States, the resulting sample consisted of only those from the Southern region. CITs’ experiences with microaggressions in this region may be different from those in other parts of the country. Next, we did not explicitly ask about participants’ targeted identities; this information was inferred from participants’ experiences. Although a plethora of existing research focuses on racial microaggressions, we acknowledge that our participants also spoke about other marginalized identities that were salient to them. Additionally, although our sample size was congruent with the constructivist philosophical stance and scope of the study (Boddy, 2016), the sample was relatively small. Counselor educators should consider the transferability to CITs with marginalized identities working with clients of privileged identities. Finally, given van Manen’s (2016) recommendation for an interpretive conversation with participants around the identified themes, scheduling a verbal conversation with each participant for the second member check may have allowed for more input from participants on the findings. Implications for CITs, Counselor Educators, and Supervisors Readers will need to determine, along with the researchers’ description, the naturalistic generalizability of these study findings to their contexts (Hays & McKibben, 2021). However, the findings from this study offer several notable implications for CITs. As with the participants in this study, CITs experiencing uncertainty with how to respond to microaggressions from clients should be expected, given that microaggressions can be difficult to identify and rectify because of their nebulous nature (Williams et al., 2021) and given the lack of training CITs receive on how to navigate these complex issues (Haskins et al., 2015). Further, learning how to best attend to cultural issues in the counseling relationship is a learned skill (Ratts et al., 2016) that is gained through curiosity, intentional learning, lived experience, and continued professional development (McNeil & Stoltenberg, 2016). As evidenced by findings from this study, as well as other studies (e.g., Branco & Bayne, 2020), counselors choose to respond to microaggressions from their clients in a multitude of ways, including offering no response at all. How best to respond to microaggressions is ultimately the choice of the CITs themselves, including the degree to which they discuss their experience and with whom. For example, CITs must consider their position of power in the counselor role, the impact of any decision on the counseling relationship, the intentionality of clients’ microaggressions, and their own emotional well-being
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